SHOWNOTES
This podcast was originally a livestream on Facebook. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do too. This is much shorter than the full livestream which you can see here.
It’s all about your word(s) for 2020. I recommend adding this to your word (or words) as well. It’s going to make the rest of your words mean that much more!
The word: Consistent
I share:
Why 2019 was a break-through year for me because of consistency.
How it can help and why it’s not about being perfect. It’s about showing up.
The reason that consistency brings exponential growth.
The way consistency creates momentum and confidence.
How one simple act of consistency helped me be healthier.
An honest conversation about creating content consistently.
A Quora content idea that you can use to position yourself as the go-to expert in your field. In less than 10 minutes a day.
Why I think starting small is the way to get massive results.
A new super-power than everyone can own.
The power of having consistent offers in your business.
What can you commit to creating consistently this year?
“CONSISTENCY IS THE THING THAT UNLOCKS THE MAGIC”
RESOURCES
Front Row CEO Content Planning System
TRANSCRIPT
00:03 Hey guys, it's Gary Vaynerchuck and you're listening to the Front Row Entrepreneur podcast with our girl Jen.
00:13 This episode actually started as a live stream on Facebook and while I don't think that generally speaking, live stream translate well to podcasts. As it turns out, this one turned out pretty well with a little bit of editing and I wanted to share it with you because I really enjoyed having this conversation and I think you might enjoy it too. Hey folks, Jen Lehner here of jenlehner.com and I wanted to talk to you about your word of the year. I've been thinking a lot about this over the last couple of weeks and I've never really had a word of the year, but I really liked the idea of it and I heard a friend of mine talking about it in terms that made a lot of sense to me. I'm a very practical person, so if we're going to do a word of the year, there's gotta show me like a good hard reason why we're doing that.
01:06 Like how does that actually work? Does it just make you feel good? Is it just one more like little fluffy thing that we do to say that we're doing it to distract us, yada yada. But I was super convinced when I heard this friend talking about it because what she said was she was able to filter every decision that year through. She had two words through those two words and it basically, that helped her so much because if the thing did not fit in those two categories, it was a hard no goodbye and right until that kept her so focused and I'm like, yes, I really, really liked that. But the word that I'm going to suggest that everybody add to their as their word of the year, so you don't have to have just one word of the year. If you've already picked your word, add this to your word and if you haven't picked your word, let this be your word.
Read more...
01:55 Okay. Are you ready? It is consistent because that has been a revelation to me this year, particularly 2019 for me was a year when I've been the most consistent then I've been on anything in my life on, I mean I was consistent on so many things all year long and it's, it pays off exponentially when you are consistent. So if you do something small but good for you, good for your business every single day, every single day, there's an exponential reward. There's an exponential effect. So let's think of some ways that you can be consistent and let's make it gentle enough and doable enough that it's not, you know, we're not going to consistently climb a mountain every day. Like that's not what I mean. And the other thing is a consistency does not equate with, it's not synonymous with every day or perfection. So let's talk about some things that we want to be consistent and realistic ways that we can be consistent.
03:03 Are, you hear me talk about it all the time, but my flash briefing, I consistently do every morning, Monday through Friday, but I let, I let myself take the weekends off. That happens no matter what, Monday through Friday. And I really never look to see how many people are listening. I mean, that's bad marketing on my part, but it's because the reason that I don't really look much at the analytics behind my flash briefing is first of all, I see the growth because people come to join my Facebook group, they send me messages, they purchase things, and they tell me that they found me on my flash briefing. So like I know it's working, but the reason that I don't care about the analytics is because of the consistency. So many other things. It has spread into so many aspects of my life. I have to get up early, I have to get up early to do my flash briefing.
03:56 And so since I was getting up earlier than normal than I started consistently thinking, wow, I really like getting up early like this every single day. What else can I do? So I started going to yoga every day. Now it's like yoga slash walking every day. Either way. Consistently I'm doing that because consistently I'm already up. Then it was like, wow, I'm up. What else can I add to this? I really digging this morning thing. So I started doing morning pages every morning. Again, I give myself the weekends off, but it was like, wow, and now I'm like this consistent person and guess then what happened? So then this feeling of like, wow, like I think I've turned into a very disciplined person. Like who thought that was going to happen with my bed, made journaling, done exercises, done, content created, and so I thought felt differently about myself and so I started eating better.
04:49 Right. And and, and, and sort of, I have just shifted over the course of about three years, really four years. Like the whole way my whole lifestyle has changed, but I'm just saying it just started with one simple act. So this year, I know one of the things I want to be consistent on asthma podcast, I want to create 52 podcasts next year, no matter what. That will be one podcast a week. I've just declared it publicly. So now I sort of have to, what is it that you would like to do consistently? I mean, and I would like it to be, I would like you to be thinking about content creation specifically because so many of us, well watch a really inspiring webinar or we'll watch a course and someone will make a case for something, right? Guilty of that. You might hear me talk about Alexa flash briefings or somebody else talk about Pinterest and Pinterest is just the greatest and you're getting hit with all these things.
05:41 You're like, Oh, I need to do that, I need to do that, I need to do that. And the next thing you know, you have so many things, you do none of it and or you do a little here, you stop, you do a little here and you stop. So you have to have an honest conversation about that one thing that you could do. And I would like it to be every day. So it feels truly consistent, right? Like an everyday thing that you could do or Monday through Friday, what could you do that is doable for you and that you kind of enjoy cause that's important. So I'll give you an idea. There's a website called Quora, quora.com Q U Oh R a.com. And Quora is a place where it's like Reddit, people go and they ask questions and anybody can answer them and you could make it a habit to answer one question a day on Cora, guess what happens?
06:33 It's so cool. So if you were to do that, Quora, it's like medium is going to get your content seen by more people. You're going to be seen as an expert over on that platform. You can add links and video and all sorts of stuff to any post over there. Okay. It's highly, highly searchable. And also you get your own like unique URL page of all the questions you've ever answered. So you could say, for example, you just want to answer questions. Mike could just go to Quora and every day answer a question. Let's just say Monday through Friday. Mike answers a question every day that is in the financial realm because Mike is all about finances, right? Personal finances, financial planning, all that kind of stuff. So he picks maybe even like a little pocket niche of that and he answers that every single day. That takes him five, 10 minutes.
07:30 He's created content that day and no matter what else he does for the rest of the day, he's created content. And again, it's just little, it's just little. But if he looks back 365 days from today when he started doing the core, it's um, it's, it's a masterpiece, right? It is a masterpiece of content and he can do so much with that and repurposing that content later. Consistency is so hard because we say, I'm going to get up at 5:00 AM every day and go to the gym. No, you're not. Yeah. That's so hard. I mean, you might get to that, right? Like, so maybe it's better to start, it's better to start small, like a little small thing. I'm going to get up and the minute that my feet hit the ground, I'm going to do five pushups. I'm going to do five pushups every day. And actually I've started doing that five pushups everyday.
08:17 Who can do that so easy? And then of course it's like any building a habit. Then you just do it on autopilot. And here's the other thing, once you do this and like it builds so much confidence in yourself that you actually could do this and that you did do this. You just feel so strong and confident and creating new habits becomes a superpower suddenly. Like you've unlocked something because you're like, if I could do this, Oh, I can build this habit and it becomes a game. It becomes fun. Like what? What can I challenge myself with next? You know? And it's absolutely thrilling. So I particularly, you can do anytime a year. I just really love this time of year because it's not about a resolution and it's not about an intention. It's a commitment, right? You're going to make a commitment to yourself to do this one little thing consistently.
09:07 Like, what is that going to be? Let's talk about health. Let's talk about our diets. You know, do you have to give up all carbs? Giving up something isn't as fun as adding something, right? Like I think it's better to add something. It feels like you're building, like you're growing. When you, when you say, okay, I'm going to eliminate something that feels very bad. I mean, you know, like you're depriving yourself of something. Here's what I want to say is that the older I get and I think about consistency, I feel like it is the key to success in every single component of our lives. Every single part of our lives. To be successful as a parent, you need to be consistent. We're not always going to be consistent, but like that's what we strive to be like. Our kids need to know that we are consistently there for them, that we are consistently honest.
09:58 You know, that they can count on us. It's all about like for all the mistakes you could ever make as a parent. If you are just consistently more often than not this thing, you know, then then you're getting it right. Like most of the time. Right. Same thing was as being a spouse. It's so hard, like it's so hard to be consistent, but it's the more we can be, the better off our relationships are being a consistent friend, showing up for our friends. That's something that I'm going to do more this year. I have been so immersed in my work that I haven't been like calling up my, my good friends to say, let's go for a walk, let's go have coffee and that sort of thing. So a friend's is on my word list because I really want to be, I want to be more proactive.
10:44 They are the ones that always call me and ask me to do stuff. So I need to flip that a little bit. Right. So what else? Um, so consistency in work obviously or let's, we're going to circle back at the end to, to our work, but consistency, parenting, consistency in our, with our partners, consistency with our health and the way that we live. Getting to bed early or at a decent time every night, waking up at the time that works best for us and serves us best. Cause I'm not going to say get up early cause that doesn't necessarily work for everybody. But yeah, it's just consistency. I just can't think like whatever other word we choose, consistency is the thing that unlocks the magic. It's the miracle grow that you put on your tomato plant. It just, it's everything and it doesn't have to be hard.
11:35 That's the thing like consistency just seems so like drudgery, boring, you know. No room for spontaneous spontaneity but that's not what it is at all. It is showing up for yourself regularly. So now I want to tie it back in. Circling back to business and developing, you know, growing our audiences and making more sales. That also comes back to consistency. So now what we need to think of, so for example, we need to consistently have an offer, right? Like a lot of us will have an offer and we put it out there and then that's done. So we launch something and we work, work, work, work, work. And then that happens. And then what happens after that? Your offers need to be consistent unless they're not, unless it's just like a onetime thing that you're doing for people. Consistent content is really what it all comes back to.
12:39 People aren't really going to find you. They're not gonna connect with you. They're not going to feel like they understand you unless you show up consistently. And the thing is, I think a lot of us are shy in the beginning. I know that I was, I mean there's nothing about me that's shy but apprehensive of like annoying people because you didn't want to be too loud. And I think that's natural. But as we all know, like there's a lot of noise and people are so busy so, so I appreciate it so much when that creator is back, you know, and maybe she's talking about the same thing. It's all good. I don't care. You don't care either. I just publish the exact same posts on my business page that I posted yesterday. But it was, I had to make a few changes, but I just decided not to delete the original one.
13:29 I don't care that they're kind of like too posts back to back because I know that you, the viewer, you're not coming to my business page like that. You're seeing content in your stream and that's how I'm showing up to you. So you click on that. You're not like, wonder what Jim's up to today and then going over to my Facebook business page. That's not how we, how we do things. Just can you brainstorm some things and we can brainstorm together some things that you can do content wise, consistently, truly being completely honest with yourself. Like what could you do on a regular basis every day allowing for weekends off because everybody needs a break. What can you do? What kind of content can you commit to for every day? And I would even say if you could, if you could just consistently go live every Tuesday, every Wednesday, where people start to anticipate that people will start to anticipate that you will of course remind them via email with your Facebook posts, whatever it takes, you're going to make sure that people understand that you're going live every Monday through Friday at two o'clock every Wednesday, whatever.
14:39 It's all about consistency and it won't, it won't even be a year from now. When you look back and go, Holy cow, look at what I built. It will be 30 days from now. You know, it will happen. It happens quickly. It might be that for your consistency, you just say, all right, every day I'm going to show up in my stories. You know, and you can just scribble down right now, like what? There should be a combination of things and not trying to promote my new content planning system, a front row, ceo.com/planner but my content system is all about this, which is actually you just sort of start with one piece of anchor content, right? So if you're you, that might be a podcast, it might be a live stream and then you could make it so that everyday in your stories you talk about some component of that piece of anchor content and you consistently do that just everyday in your stories.
15:31 So think be thinking about that because stories are super powerful and now you can obviously you can, when you post your Instagram stories you can at the same time post your Facebook stories. So that's a really easy way to show up consistently. What's something else? That is a powerful way to be consistent email, you know, if you like to write then just sending out consistent email, not sales emails, but like really thoughtful, consistent emails. The way that you know, you would write a handwritten letter and Hey maybe that's your jam. Maybe you love to sit down and write handwritten letters or maybe you don't want to write everybody hated written letter, but you hand address the outside of the envelope and you print copies of a letter that you send to everybody on Monday every week and they come to look forward to the snail mail.
16:22 And maybe you don't do that with your whole audience, but for the, for the 20 people who have ever been your customers, the hundred people who have ever purchased anything from you, from a dollar to $10,000 and on, you're going to send them something in the mail every week consistently, and they know that that's coming. Wow. Can you imagine the impact that would make huge consistency. We talked about how it's not an intention, it's not a resolution. It's more of a declaration. It's more of a commitment. Whatever your word is, please add consistency as your second word or your third word. Okay. Top it off with consistency. See you later.
